ABSTRACT
There are 11 big cities whose populations are over 1 million as of February 2010 (provisional estimates): Tokyo (8.5 million), Yokohama (3.6 million), Osaka (2.6 million), Nagoya (2.2 million), Sapporo (1.9 million), Kobe (1.5 million), Kyoto (1.5 million), Fukuoka (1.4 million), Kawasaki (1.3 million), Saitama (1.2 million), Hiroshima (1.2 million), and Sendai (1 million). Japan has dense ground transportation infrastructures, both road and railway networks, and they link the major cities. Roads are classified into four categories: national motorways, national roads, prefectural roads, and municipal roads, and the total length of these roads reached 1,196,217 km as of April 2008. There are are 9499 km of expressways or highways, mostly national motorways, whose main routes are shown in Figure 23.1a, as of August 2009. The target length of expressways is 14,000 km.
